Apps vanish; backups save the day

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In recent weeks, has offered multiple articles on backing up your Mac. And with good reason. This is a critical yet too-often ignored bit of advice.

MacBook Pro Teardown Reveals First Peek of Thunderbolt

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The teardown experts at iFixit turned their attention this week to Apple's latest version of the . The Early 2011 edition looks a lot like its predecessors, with two new features on the logic board. It's the first Apple portable with a quad-core processor, , and it includes the shiny-new I/O connection for screaming data and display transfers.

Change Expose highlight color

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By default, a highlighted window in Exposé is surrounded by an ethereal blue halo. That halo--and, therefore, the window it's surrounding--can be hard to spot, particularly on portable Macs with the screen brightness turned down. Fortunately, you can change that highlight color to something a bit more visible; it's easy to change, but it does require editing some system files. For that reason, make sure you make backup copies of the files in question before you start hacking them.

Cubelets Let You Build Robots Without Any Experience

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Attach the blocks together (don't forget to attach the all-important battery block) and the modular robot can take on a surprisingly wide variety of forms! Schweikardt didn't plan on marketing the cubes--in fact, the architecture grad student developed them as a school project and nothing more. But lab visitors kept asking to buy the kit, and thus the idea became a reality.

Sony Cuts PSP Price to $130 Ahead of NGP

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Getting in front of , not due until year's end, Sony today announced it's slashing the price of its the PlayStation Portable gaming handheld. Starting Sunday, February 27, you'll be able to pick up a PSP-3000 (that's the standard version with UMD drive) for $130, a nearly 25 percent drop from $170.

How to turn Chrome into gold

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Though Google is pitching it as an operating system for netbooks and lightweight notebooks, Chrome OS is essentially the Chrome Web browser bolted on top of a bare minimum version of Linux. The following extensions can improve the user experience of Chrome (OS or browser) to give you some of the functionality found in a traditional operating system.

US cybercrime complaints fell 10 percent last year

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The U.S. agency that tracks complaints of criminal activity on the Internet reported Thursday that fewer people complained about Internet fraud in 2010 than in the previous year.

PayPal reinstates fund meant to help U.S. Army's Manning

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PayPal has lifted a temporary restriction placed on the account of Courage to Resist, a group raising funds to support the legal defense of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was arrested for allegedly downloading classified information and providing it to the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website.

Gigabit optical network slated for Taiwan

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Alcatel-Lucent and Taiwan's main fixed-line telecom provider will build a gigabit passive optical network by the third quarter of 2011 to merge high-speed Internet with other services.

China blocks LinkedIn, ramps up Internet censorship

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The social networking site LinkedIn has been blocked in China, a move that analysts say is tied to Chinese government efforts to suppress mention of a "Jasmine Revolution" on the Internet.

Gartner: Server sales kept bouncing back in Q4

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Worldwide server revenue and unit shipments continued a yearlong recovery in the fourth quarter of 2010, but growth is likely to slow this year, research company Gartner said on Thursday.

Xoom 4G upgrade could take more than six days

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Users will have to send their Motorola Xoom tablets away for a week in order to upgrade them to 4G, Verizon Wireless said this week.

Publishers slowly warm to library e-lending

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Can libraries continue their role as lenders when books are in digital form? While library executives are set on the idea, at least some book publishers seem to still be wary of having libraries circulate electronic copies of their books to multiple parties, even with controls in place.

Correction: Music execs stressed over free streaming

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Due to a reporting error, the story "Music execs stressed over free streaming," posted Thursday, misidentified a paid streaming music service as a free streaming music service. The ninth paragraph, which has been corrected on the wire, of the story now reads:

Xoom Vs. iPad: The Real Tablet Wars Begin

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Motorola couldn't have chosen a worse time to start selling the Xoom, the first real Apple iPad competitor. Just as the Xoom went on sale on Verizon, in the shape of a press invitation next week to the unveiling of the next generation iPad (let's call it the iPad 2).

Developers respond to FTC inquiry on in-app purchases

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Developers of childrens' games for Apple's iOS platform say that they're taking steps to prevent accidental, costly in-app purchases, an issue that has as well as .

Disk Doctors Photo Recovery

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Of all of the files stored on computers and external drives of all kinds, media files are among our most cherished. Losing them can be horrifying, so after you've accidentally hit delete or someone has formatted over a USB drive containing all of your travel pictures, a data recovery program can be a simple way to head off a full-blown panic attack. ($50, free demo) is designed to help recover just those important media files.

Apple invites bug researchers to scrutinize Lion OS

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Apple is offering security experts a copy of the developer preview of Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, and asking them for feedback.

The Deals Just Keep On Spinning

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Breaking up may be hard to do, as Neil Sedaka put it in song. But it's certainly a tune that more and more big companies are singing these days.

Chrome Browser Acts More Like an OS, But Security Is Unclear

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Google has announced that will be able to . Essentially, the feature moves Chrome one step closer to becoming a true application platform--and with , in a few years time it's very likely the Chrome browser will have more in common with an operating system than a humble Web browser.

New Google Apps tools aim to bridge collaboration divide

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Google has released three new tools as part of its Google Apps suite, designed to increase collaboration in the enterprise.

T-Mobile USA loses subscribers but gains smartphones

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T-Mobile USA suffered a net loss of 23,000 customers in the fourth quarter but gained 1 million smartphone users, which helped to increase the data revenue that the carrier pulled in from an average subscriber.

Apple no longer thinks different

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Remember when ? They wanted us to see them as being like us, their customers. They wanted us to believe we had similar values, goals and aspirations. They wanted to convince us that, with their help, computers would be different, life would be different, and we would be different. We would be happier, more productive, more fulfilled.

How CIOs Can Devise a Social Business Strategy

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Untapped data. Inability to scale. Dismal adoption. Overspending. Gaping security holes. These are some of the most common challenges—and often sources of failure—that enterprises encounter following a social solution deployment, according to a new report by Forrester Research.

Security that doesn't get in the way

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I was on the road last week, attending the in San Francisco, which is a great place to run into colleagues. Afterwards, I visited Disneyland, which, despite being in the same state, is surprisingly far away. What do these places have in common? .

HIMSS11 – What’s After EMR?

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This year, the annual HIMSS conference showed evidence of the emergence of a robust, post-EMR IT market. While many end users are still neck deep in stimulus-related EMR and CPOE implementations, healthcare business leaders and industry strategists were focused on post-reform business models and the transformation to accountable care. Attendance was up this year with a reported 31,000-plus participants, and several hundred new companies on the show floor. The gold rush in health shows no signs of letting up, and new market participants seem to be still emerging on a daily basis.

Can the Nokia deal save Microsoft?

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Microsoft's recent deal with Nokia will put Windows Phone 7 on millions of Nokia mobile phones around the world. Microsoft in turn will shower billions of dollars on Nokia in marketing, engineering and other costs. The companies hope that together, they can make inroads into the mobile market that has increasingly become dominated by Apple's iPhone and Google's Android. Some people have argued that combining the forces of two companies that have been failing in the mobile market will add up to little more than failure times two. But the deal may well save Microsoft from a slow-growth future. The partnership is one of the most important that Microsoft has made in recent years -- so important, in fact, that the billions of dollars it's spending may well save the company and ensure that its technology remains relevant, and its products stay viable, well into the fast-changing mobile future.

LibreOffice Software Is Here to Stay

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If there was any doubt as to long-term ability of to sprint ahead of Oracle-backed OpenOffice.org, those concerns pretty much just flew out the window. In a wildly successful fundraising effort, the Document Foundation has succeeded in collecting $68,800 (50,000 euros) in just eight days, effectively ensuring a future for the open-source.

Motorola Xoom Gets Hacked In Under An Hour

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Despite just being released on February 24th, the Motorola Xoom has become the newest victim of developer rooting, and it took less than two hours to do it. Xeriouxly. The best part? The Clockwork Recovery running on it means that other developers can now create their own custom ROMs to hack whatever they want onto the tablet.

Police Raid PS3 Hacker's Home, Hacker Retaliates

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Sony is . So annoyed, in fact, that they've involved law enforcement: , PS3 and Linux hacker said the local police and a Sony representative raided his house.

Seagate still looking into Momentus XT drive problems

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Seagate has played down by users of the company's Momentus XT hybrid hard drive despite ongoing queries to its support forum.

Be a savvy Mac software shopper

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Apple's launch of the offers another place for Mac users to buy software. But savvy Mac shoppers should know that the App Store isn't the best option when it's time to exchange your hard-earned scratch for a sweet new app. Sometimes, it may be better to go straight to the developer's Website to buy--if, of course, the software isn't strictly exclusive to the App Store.

Consumer Reports Disses Verizon iPhone 4 Antenna

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Consumer Reports is back for another round of "antennagate," refusing to recommend the Verizon iPhone 4 due to antenna problems.